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Personal Blog of Donavan Neese
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3232(PS4) Horizon Zero Dawn, A Review. (Mechanized Dumpster Diving)https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/ps4-horizon-zero-dawn-a-review-mechanized-dumpster-diving/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/ps4-horizon-zero-dawn-a-review-mechanized-dumpster-diving/#respondTue, 06 Nov 2018 20:30:09 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8816Continue reading (PS4) Horizon Zero Dawn, A Review. (Mechanized Dumpster Diving)]]>When Horizon Zero Dawn came out, the world was just a little busy with another open world game you may have heard of. Despite that, the game was successful both commercially and critically. I always thought it had a great setting and look, and I’m always down for a game starring a badass female lead. Especially when they can hunt and ride mechanized dinosaurs! Yo!

So I found it on sale earlier this year and I crunched it down. It took a little bit to get invested, but I will say that the story-based intrigue begins right away. I felt captivated by the plot such that I actually wanted to know what was going to happen next: a feeling I never experience while playing video games, as normally they feature brain-dead, simplistic plots. While the gameplay itself wasn’t the best I’d ever felt, and the open world aspects seemed somewhat derivative to modern open world archetypes (Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft as a brand), I came away from Horizon Zero Dawn feeling like I had truly experienced something special.

Visually, Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the more stunning games to look at on the PS4. Environments truly shine, with rich foliage that changes depending on where you are in the world. Some places look like autumn, some are winter wonderlands, others are dry deserts. These drastic changes reminded me of Red Dead Redemption. It makes for a world that seems more realistic and immersive, and although I couldn’t tell you where I was in the world without opening up the map, each difference contributed to creating a sense of place.

A lot of the time you’re diving into underground areas to uncover the mystery of the old ones. These dungeons have different designs for the most part however they do look a bit samey, and they’re certainly drab compared to the beautiful outside environments. They also all contain storage chests that inexplicably contain crafting materials, and I found it hard to believe these areas would contain such in real life, but alas: it is a video game after all.

Another gamey aspect of Horizon’s visual presentations plays with the stealth mechanic, and that’s the red bushes that cover the entire world in patches. They had to do this in order to let Alloy sneak and hunt, but in what world do patches of red bushes cover every single area including deserts and tundra? It wasn’t a major problem that I experienced this jarring unrealistic aspect of an otherwise picturesque world, just something I could be amused about from time to time. Also, they look perty.

The human models look pretty good too. The main characters all look better, and animate better in cutscenes, when compared to more minor NPCs. The stand out is obviously Alloy. She seems to carry with her more expressive animations that do a good job at matching what she’s saying. A lot of times, people’s animations seem randomized during these conversations, which makes for a jarring experience watching people flop around while discussing the most dire situations. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t take the game seriously, but it was definitely noticeable with some of the most minor of characters.

The sound and music do their job. Sound does a great job selling the threat of the mechanical monsters, and combat performs a wonderful exhibition of tactile, reactionary sound design, making hits feel really satisfying. I particularly loved the sounds these machines made. Each type hosts a varied collection of noises that felt suitable to their visual presence. If there was one aspect lacking in the sound department it would be the music. Nothing really stands out as memorable, but it wasn’t horrible either. The menu music always begins at the same point, thus becoming the biggest earworm of the tracks. It’s an odd combination of annoying and soothing that I felt I neither liked nor disliked. But I’d definitely think about it from time to time when I wasn’t playing.

Horizon Zero Dawn is an open world action RPG with a giant landmass to explore and a healthy dose of stealth. The game’s combat feels chaotic and sloppy however it is manageable with the several slow down abilities granted by the game’s systems and the various skills the player gains over the course of leveling up. The game controlled and felt well. It did a good job communicating what was going on. The nature of several different machines attacking at once created intense fights that proved to be stressful at times, and annoying in other times. I never avoided combat entirely because I hated it, but I never went looking with combat for the engagement.

Experience points come quickly so you never really feel underdeveloped for the objective at hand. There were a couple of times I decided to run away entirely from an overworld encounter due to a powerful monster being several levels higher than what I was, and this is good. All overworlds should possess danger, else why would my character need to level up in the first place?

The overworld is layed out in zones like most open world games are. You begin in a small area that serves as the tutorial for the game, and after narritive the game opens up allowing Alloy to go anywhere she wants. I admit that I wasn’t ever prone to just exploring the environment for the sake of exploring, but that wasn’t the fault of the game’s open world design, I believe. I felt the story more compelling than the side objectives, or the world exploration, but I’ll get into more story stuff later on.

Combat features a dose of traps and a heavy rotation of bow and spear. As Alloy is a hunter from a hunter and gatherer tribal society, her gameplay begins in a sort of stealth mode, where she stalks from red bush to red bush stealth killing enemies and goading others into traps. Once the enemy detects her they try to alert the others, and everyone joins together in an assault. The machines mostly charge Alloy, with others more designed around shooting. Humans mostly shoot, while others charge with spears. Some machines and humans carry with them heavy weapons that Alloy can pick up off the ground and use for the limited amount of ammo they possess. There are also elements which certain enemies are weak to, and exploiting these weakness becomes vital if the player wishes to end engagements quicker while maintaining some semblance of control over the battlefield. As I said, it can all become rather overwhelming.

When fighting machines it becomes possible to apply enough pressure to particular sections in order to break them off. In some cases, you can destroy these machines by shooting an explosive tank, or you can blow off one of their guns, then pick it up and use it against other enemies. I found this to be rather satisfying, and it was probably the funnest part of the combat for me.

Overall the combat feels very reactionary. When I began to feel overwhelmed, I found myself dipping into the various menus crafting and recrafting until I had spammed everything to death. This game has a heavy emphasis on crafting, yet materials are literally everywhere both in the world, inside chests, and on dead enemies, so I never found myself out of materials all that often. I would usually run out of healing options, especially when I was mid-way through the game, but a lot of that had to do with my own unsuccessful preparations for battle. Vendors exist all over the place, both inside and outside towns, so you can always opt to buying materials if you really need them quick. It’s fairly easy to make money so I never had a problem buying what I needed.

Weapons can also be modified. Modifications increase several stats, such as raw damage, elemental damage, and handling. Increasing handling means you aim weapons a lot quicker, and this becomes important for certain weapons you’ll want to snap up with, like the bomb throwers, because they’re very good weapons for crowd control as you’re being overwhelmed. I didn’t much enjoy having a separate tab in the menu to do so, as often I’d be viewing a weapon in the wrong tab, I’d press the button to modify, and meet the same disappointed realization that I was in the wrong place. Nothing is a roadblock to fun like a clucky interface, and this is really the only flaw that makes Horizon feels clunky to control. Everything else is relatively streamlined for mass consumption, and done so quite well.

Horizon loves to have its players picking up everything in the environment in order to craft and trade. Inventory caps limit what the player can pick up, and this can become frustrating when it comes to sticks. As sticks are used to craft arrows, it can be too easy to overload yourself with sticks in the beginning of the game. Sticks stack in bushels of 100 in your inventory, and by the end of the game I had about 350 without even picking up sticks for the second half of the game. You cannot sell sticks, so the only way to rid of them is by dropping them, which feels wasteful. So they sat in my inventory, taking up space.

You can improve your inventory, like in Far Cry (3, 4), by killing animals and collection materials for crafting expansions. I remember really enjoying this mechanic in Far Cry as it gave me a reason to explore and learn combat with the various forms of wildlife. But in Horizon I never gave it much thought. It becomes difficult, nearly impossible to find the right animals you need. I crafted all of my expansions with materials I gathered by chance. It’s extremely important to have enough meat on hand, though, as it is (strangely) used to craft potions. At the end of the game I was sucking down potions like craft beer yum.

Alloy is an outcast at the beginning of the game, as she was born without any parents. You watch as she grows into a young woman capable of murdering every animal, human, and mechanical demon she sees. Events occur which then propels you through the world in search for answers, in which you learn the tribe that once considered you an outcast were themselves outcasts from the outside world. You uncover the mysterious origins of the world. You find out what happened to the ancient ones. You find yourself knee deep in a catastrophic, apocalyptic threat that you must eradicate in order to save the world.

You meet characters along the way that each serve nuggets of intrigue. You learn their motivations, their desires, and help them with something of major importance. There are some characters whose lives you change for the better, and I always found it odd that, once their story related side mission concluded, that they kind of pushed you on to the next story beat without much of an issue. Some character propose they remain by Alloy’s side, either for assistance or out of attraction, and Alloy shoves them off, claiming she’d be better off alone. This is a lie, as she constantly depends on the help of others (one character you meet later on in particular), so I don’t see that as a valid reason why these characters don’t stick around in more major ways. The end does some work to include these major characters in Alloy’s story–a last major battle in which they all take part of (and I assume more may accompany Alloy if she chooses to help them out during the myriad of side objectives I chose not to complete). But that doesn’t feel enough. Something feels off when you help find a character’s dead relative, help act revenge for said relative, and then fuck off to the next thing. I’m certainly not wanting Alloy to involve herself with any of these characters romantically, even though most of the characters do (and there may even be a story reason as to why they’d want to align themselves with Alloy), but even friendly companionship seems to not exist in Alloy’s world.

For a woman who never knew her parents, or friendship, or love, maybe this makes sense. The distance does her good in that it allows her some personal reflection, but anxiety, or a lack of trust certainly comes into play here as well.

Or maybe I’m making all of this up about a game about stealth that requires the player to be alone all the time?

I think I experienced some real emotion during these character stories, and I expected some kind of involvement across the remainder of the experience. It felt jarring when such established characters dropped off until the end of the game.

Maybe most games do a poor job at establishing characters, so I expected these relationships to be more major.

That’s an overall small gripe I have with a story I honestly fell in love with. Truly, Horizon Zero Dawn features one of my favorite stories I’ve experienced in recent years across all methods of storytelling. Alloy herself is an interesting, complex character, and uncovering her past, her destiny, her origin, is just as interesting as seeing how she develops and interacts with the various characters she meets. There’s a part where characters come together to literally praise Alloy as some kind of deity to be worshiped. Alloy chooses to berate them, wanting nothing to do with all the praise. This reaction felt realistic, and well realized/in line with Alloy’s character development. How many video game protagonists would love to be raised on such a pedestal? To be showered with prayer as if they were actual gods?

This game has the opposite problem as an Elder Scrolls. The main story was so good, I ended up wanting to ignore the side stuff the further I got in. Luckily, the game dumps the player out right before the last mission after the player completes the last story mission. While I would have prefered to have a world post-ending to see new side missions develop relative to what happened in that main story, it makes sense to do this as events occur that change the world such that most of those remaining side objectives wouldn’t make sense. Plus, it’ll be nice to wrap up those quests and see how they change that last mission.

I have yet to play the DLC, Frozen Wilds, and I do plan on going back to tackle those side missions. I’ll have to write a piece later following up on all of this to see if they drastically change my opinion on Horizon Zero Dawn. At this point, I’m willing to say this is the best story in an open world game, and overall I’d say this is one of the must play titles in this generation. PS4 owners: play this game if you haven’t already.

9/10

It is a must play title.

In planning, I want to tackle a somewhat short (ha ha, like I’m capable of short) review of Breath of the Wild, before finally tackling a major analysis and comparison to Red Dead Redemption 2. I like to think of this trio as the finest example of open world gaming this generation, however interestingly each game does this in a different way that I find fascinating. As a person who felt genuinely tired of open world games, it feels nice to have so many register with me. These games will definitely stand as defining postnotes for this generation of consoles.

Anyway, look forward to more bullshit

toocanslam

11/05/2018

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/ps4-horizon-zero-dawn-a-review-mechanized-dumpster-diving/feed/0horizon zero dawndjneeseLife, Part 7 (0s, 1s)https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/life-part-7-0s-1s/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/life-part-7-0s-1s/#respondMon, 29 Oct 2018 05:24:47 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8820Continue reading Life, Part 7 (0s, 1s)]]>After a month of playing Life at least four hours a day, going on 8, I wound up without a job, having not spoken to my friends or family once. For all they know, I’m dead. And maybe I am. But I don’t care? I need to get my hours in, afterall. Highest priority.

There are times when I’m playin late into the night feeling like I’ll doze off any second. Once I begin to drift, I jolt awake. As if a current of electricity ran through my body, emitted by the floor, by my chair, by the keyboard.

A few days I’ve pulled mad marathons, my longest record being 28 straight hours. When you stand after 28 hours, hunched over a writing desk ill fit for a computer, sitting on a shoddy office chair, your legs immediately give out as if they had forgotten movement. I had forgotten to eat or drink water: my body satisfied by the video game alone. I hadn’t even gotten up to go to the bathroom once during that entire 28 hours.

The game puts me into this serene sort of daze. Where I’m not really awake, but I’m not sleeping either–fully conscious with what’s around me. What’s happening in the game. Fully cognisant without really thinking. It feels peaceful, yet horrifying. Like I am letting someone program my body into that of a zombie.

It makes me wonder. Is this what heroin addiction is like?

I’m drifting on fumes. When I’m not playing Life, I’m thinking about how badly I need to be playing Life. I’m only alive when I am playing. I cannot say this is happiness, it is just a presence. Like nothing else going on is real. Like I’m not breathing air, drinking water, eating food when I’m away from the game. None of my senses operate. The neurons in my brain run cold, making me feel a dull ache in weird place of my body, especially in my finger tips. I think they must be touching keys. They must be interacting with the game. Writing does no good, even now. It almost hurts to do so.

I can’t bare this any longer. I need to get my hours in.

07/19/2018

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/life-part-7-0s-1s/feed/0djneeseLife, A Review. Part 6. Routine.https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/life-a-review-part-6-routine/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/life-a-review-part-6-routine/#respondWed, 24 Oct 2018 20:00:29 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8813Continue reading Life, A Review. Part 6. Routine.]]>When my character, Ass Boy, graduated from high school and went to college, the open world became more hostile and difficult. It was higher leveled enemies attacking my avatar who needed to find a decent part time job so he could eat, balance everything with studying, and wake up in time for class. It wasn’t exactly different from the high school portion of Life: just more developed and difficult.

The cool thing was the mechanics kept evolving. Most games would be contempt with teaching the player all the mechanics and then leave the rest of the game to challenging the player’s ability to employ those mechanics. In Life, at least in this open world segment, I was learning new abilities that changed how I played consistently throughout the entire experience (up to that point).

For example, when my character got to college he started going to parties. These would rapidly change to horde mode styled wave defence, and my character had to learn to put up certain barriers, and defend the room from the bad guys swarming in. They looked like demons wearing frat clothes and throwing inflamed solo cups. It was odd but kinda humorous. The world often turned allowing my character to walk on walls and deal with the baddies from the ceiling. I’d install these turrets that shot poisonous letters (philosophy, maybe?) and the demons would halt their progress to get sick all over the place, which let me shoot them easily with my arm cannon. None of these abilities were present during the previous portion of the game, and in spots on the overworld map I could employ them in some very fun ways. Like walking up buildings to find secret collectables, or installing turrets to fight some higher leveled enemies on the map.

Still, Assboy spent a lot of free social time with Richard, who was his roommate in dorm. They’d fight sometimes, but they’d prove to be rather good dorm partners which surprised me, knowing that most of the time living with your friends can lead to disaster. I think part of that comes to Richard’s ability to understand what Assboy is going through, and vice versa, so they get to relate to each other more, and let things slide. Again I was struck with this idea that the game’s narritive around social interaction held much more compelling nuance than that of which I’ve seen in other games.

Assboy graduate with a liberal arts degree. The game didn’t tell me what kind of specific liberal arts he studied. I thought that was a bit lazy…or maybe the game was trying to say something using the generic term “liberal arts.” Whatever. What was important was the game didn’t crash to desktop and download the next sequence this time. It actually kept going, filling out parts of the open world map that I didn’t know existed. That was where my after college job was, and when I got there for the first time I realized I was working in the same office as Richard.

This time work was handled by showing a screen of pipe dream. Kind of like the hacking mini-game in Bioshock, except the colors would change depending on the day. Every now and then Richard and Assboy would get up to some hijinks that proved to be rather entertaining. Like this one time the duo had to run to the local supply store (Staples?) and grab pens. They made a movie about their trip where the two had to play the penis game as they moved, ending with the couple screaming about male genitalia as they moved through the store. It was a kind of funny stealth sequence where you had a certain amount of time to scream penis and pushing the space bar harder produced a louder radius on your mini map. Eventually I figured out that allowing other people to hear you didn’t produce any kind of fail state…you just got a really detailed portrait of a person’s reaction.

Surprisingly, no one thought it was funny.

These mini games represented the highlight of Assboy’s workday, itself rather dull and monotonous. I get the game wants to paint the work day as being boring, but isn’t this a video game? I mean shouldn’t I be having fun playing the video game? I ended up repeating several, and I mean several, work days until I got to the next segment. Which was pretty sad. Richard got another job, leaving Assboy behind to keep working at this job. For some reason, Assboy couldn’t get another job. Either he didn’t have enough time to find another job, or there just wasn’t a better one available. Richard had earned himself a specific degree–an engineering one–and he was looking forward to a much more wealthy life than Assboy. He was also planning to get married. Assboy’s life was in a form of stasis. He felt frozen. He felt stuck.

No he didn’t. The game didn’t tell me that at all.

I felt that way. I felt that way through this character I was playing in a video game.

This was the event where the game did the thing. It crashed to desktop and began another download to replace the old game. This download wasn’t that large, but I wanted to head to bed for the night and give this thing a rest. It was getting a little frustrating, and depressing. So I let the file downloaded and I laid down.

And I couldn’t sleep.

I wanted to get back to the game…I could only think about work, and how I had to play that game of pipe dream more efficiently.

I found myself in front of the computer again…and I opened the file.

It was a stripped down version. I was now looking at a similar indie style to games like RimWorld: isometric, cartoonish humans rendered in a specific style that purposely stripped out detail in favor of a more consistent art style. I controlled my character through a more boring looking world until I got to work. I sat down, and I played pipe dream.

I’ve never liked pipe dream less. People hated this mini game in Bioshock but I actually didn’t mind playing it. It’s fun to challenge yourself in doing the game fast, and I got pretty good at it. But here there was no challenge. It was the same set of puzzles every single day, and I couldn’t do them too fast or my character would just sit there anxiously hoping not be found wasting time on the clock. So I had to methodically place tiles in order for the liquid to traverse through the pipes in such a way that I could clock out with a guilt-free conscious.

It drained my character’s psyche. If he wasn’t working, he was sitting in front of a tv. When he got home from work he sat in front of the tv. His physicality and mental state depleted until he seemed like a blank zombie.

I felt similar.

I find that I can’t feel good with myself, however, if I don’t at leats play four hours of this a day.

And it’s gone on for days. With no sign of stopping.

I’m getting to the point in the review where I’m probably gonna have to play a huge chunk of this until I have anything more interesting to say. So I may not write anything for a week or two. Just to try and burn through this segment in the game.

I also gotta stop writing so I can spend more time playing. I haven’t got my four hours in yet today, and I feel like my brain is on fire. It’s a struggle to focus long enough to get these words out.

My attic is a space I have seen twice over the course of a handful of years. The drop down ladders in my apartment complex are prone to breaking, and climbing them feels like you’re about to drop any second.

“I see you.”

There’s a very thin wall separating my attic from the next door’s. Maybe the person is up there fucking with me, and they live next door. I’ve never met them–is that weird?–so maybe this is their way on getting comfortable with their neighbors. I’m not about to get up there without knowing what’s awaiting me on the other side. Maybe they’ll just go away.

“I can hear you thinking down there. You can’t hide it from me, Donavan.”

I should call the cops and get out of here. Obviously some crazy asshole is up there and they’ve read my mail and they enter my place when I’m away just like that story I read a year ago

“Or is it Assboy?”

I jumped up, grabbed the biggest flashlight I owned, pulled down that ladder, jumped up, and shoved open the latch. I pulled the rope blinking on the small light bulb just in time to see a thin figure jump through a purple cyclone. A sound like tearing, or static, erupted from the spot accompanied by a flash of light. I was blinded momentarily. It felt like the universe was tearing apart. I was almost sent back down the ladder, but I managed to keep my balance. Once I could see again, I pulled myself up into the attic.

It definitely looked like this person had been living in my attic for some time. Food wrappers littered the space, which was populated by nice rugs I had never seen before, as well as books–manga mostly–and notebooks with which this person had been keeping notes. Likely on my living habits. My first thought was to look through those books, but the portal was getting louder. I wanted to find this guy first.

The possibility that this was a dream came to mind. I hadn’t had a dream I could remember in months–since around the time I started playing Life. Perhaps this was, somehow, an extent of the game itself. They had fucked with my head enough that I would be seeing this shit. Maybe I was still taking part in their experiment. Maybe I was up in my attic right now screaming to myself, and the neighbors would call the cops. I may wake up in some padded cell somewhere without a chance of self defence. Whatever the case I did what any rational person would do in this situation.

I dived into the portal.

When I arrived on the other end the portal closed. I might have just fucked up, but there was no time to think. I examined my surroundings and arrived at the conclusion that I had been standing in an upside down version of my house. I was in the attic, yet I was standing on the ceiling. There was no light but I could see plainly. This is because everything was glowing a purplish blue that gradually transitioned into a pinkish red, and then back again. It was like my eyes were covered in some kind of snapchat filter.

The latch was open on the floor yet I was standing on the ceiling. I jumped a few times thinking I could maybe pull myself up but I was just too short to do so. I examined the slope that led to the floor from the ceiling, and tried climbing that, which led to me realizing I could walk onto the wall and onto the floor from there. The world seemed to rotate with me, like I had sticky shoes in some kind of video game. The effect momentarily made me nauseous and I had to breathe deep and collect myself for a few seconds before climbing down the ladder.

I was once again in my apartment, yet it seemed much larger than in real life, like the living room stretched and stretched. I could see myself across the room sitting at the purple version of my computer desk. I was staring at the computer screen playing some kind of game. Likely Life.

I wanted to scream at my purple self. Try to make him move on, and carry out his real life. But no voice would come out of my mouth. So for a while I just watched. Purple me seemed to move like he was lagging. His movements would often stutter, or skip frames, especially if he was picking up a glass of water to drink. From what he was wearing it looked like this had occurred about three weeks ago, when I was stuck playing the adult portion of Life endlessly. It occured to me I could somehow be viewing a recording of myself that was hidden in a pocket of time which existed in my attic.

What was this purple world? Was I really watching a past version of myself? How did this world exist?

“Yes.”

The sound emanate from the walls. The world itself seemed to be talking to me.

“It exists to study you.”

Again, I wanted to open my mouth and speak, but I couldn’t.

“That’s because you can’t. I can read your thoughts, and send you mine. So just think.”

“Were you the man in my attic?” I thought.

“Yes,” the world replied.

“What were you doing up there?”
“I was trying to help you.”
“Help me? By spying on me?”

“I was keeping them away.”

“Keeping them away?”

“You’ll learn soon enough. Deity is very unpleased. You’ve read the emails and you’ve reacted to them. I know these things without a computer, and without speaking directly to anyone.”

“Who are you?”

“I left you notebooks. You should be reading them right now. You shouldn’t have followed me.”

“Are you going to leave me alone?”

“Yes. I felt bad about spying on you. But that’s not important right now. They’re already in your apartment right now. You have to go.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

At that moment, Purple Me got out of my chair and spun around. I was staring at me, my purple mouth screaming. My head suddenly felt like it would cave in. My vision blurred, spinning rapidly, and I fell to my knees. I was going to vomit.

“Scream, and they won’t hurt you.”

Moments later I woke on my apartment floor.

I read the notebooks. They spoke of demons. Of nightmares manifest; infesting the habitats of humans with the express goal of terrorizing inhabitants until they either went insane, or killed themselves. Entirely erasing the victim’s capability to dream allowed them to do so. Since I hadn’t dreamed in months, I understood I was the perfect candidate for these attacks. I put two and two together, and concluded that the game Life rewired my brain. I could no longer possibly dream. And now, demons could attack at any second.

The creeper told me screams could help when I was still in that purple world. The notebooks taught me some words to say, but at that point I could feel my eyes rolling into the back of my skull. What am I, dragonborn? Demons infesting my apartment? Are you fucking serious?

I wasn’t going to believe all of this shit so easily. I had been drugged in my sleep by some fucking weirdo living in my attic. I had hallucinated the portal sequence, and this book was just placed here to fuck with me.

The only thing I believed was that somehow this was all connected to Deity. This was connected to the emails. Someone was trying to get me to stop writing this review.

It’s not like any of it matters. Why are they going through this great length to try and stop me?

10/22/2018

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/life-a-review-part-5-sequence-break-portals/feed/0djneeseHalf-Life Reviewhttps://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/half-life-review/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/half-life-review/#respondFri, 19 Oct 2018 21:00:18 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8780Continue reading Half-Life Review]]>When I was twelve my father tried out this game called Unreal Tournament 2003. He really enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as I did. I quickly fell in love with the fast paced competition, grew too good for the bots, and took my skills online, which became an addiction for years. During that time my father didn’t try to get me off the computer. He actually kept buying me more games to try out based off what his friends told him online. He wasn’t the most aware guy about the current gaming scene, but he did love his chat rooms, and his friends didn’t mind shooting him off recommendations for me.

One of his friends told him I might like CS, however he failed to tell my father what “CS” stood for. So my dad got that twisted and ended up buying me Starcraft. It was okay–I was never crazy about RTS–but my father instantly discovered the alien space marine war simulator wasn’t the shooter he was looking for. I ended up discovering myself that he had the letters reversed which led me to persuading my dad to buy me Counter-Strike at a local KMart. It came in this giant boxed set that included Half-Life, the two expansions Opposing Forces and Blue Shift, and Counter-Strike.

For a long time I played nothing but Counter-Strike and I sucked each and every game. It’s a tremendous far cry from shooters that I was used to–shooters I’d grow to prefer–which were all about running and gunning. I was much too impatient for the tactical, methodical nature of Counter-Strike’s semi-realistic portrayal of shooting humans in the face. I’ve bought every Counter-Strike since then and I never got good at any of them despite spending perhaps hundreds of hours in source.

Moving on to the second game I eventually tried….the unknown Half-Life.

Like my father I was completely unfamiliar with the gaming scene at the time, so I had never heard of Half-Life. When I played it I was swept up in the high octane pace of its sci-fi horror. I was instantly drawn in by the interesting level design, the compelling subject matter, and the atmospheric sound design.

Recently I played and completed Quake II. In beating the game, and thinking about its flaws, I realized I wanted to go back and replay Half-Life. And so I did.

Before I get to my review, here’s a little contextual history lesson. Around the time of Half-Life’s release, these FPS games came out:

Unreal, Turok II, and Thief.

Quake II had come out the year previous as did Goldeneye, Blood, and Shadow Warrior.

The next year will see System Shock II come out.

Perfect Dark and Deus Ex would come out in 2000.

Over the last two or so years I have played a lot of all of these games. I have just finished a playthrough of Quake II for review, and am actively replaying Quake for a let’s play. I return to DOOM all the time. I played many dozens of hours of Goldeneye as a child, and though I never played it I respect Thief and everything it brought to the table in FPS. At the time of this review I am playing Blood, which has quickly become a new favorite of mine in the (ultra specific) genre of 90’s FPS. I’m also doing a let’s play of the game’s first episode in the spirit of Hallow’s Wiener.

The thing about Half-Life is that it

A B S O L U T E L Y

D E S T R O Y S

these games! It’s no contest! The sheer polish and ambition alone is staggering. The fact that it works such flawless execution is fucking phenomenal. Played in context of its time period you really see why Half-Life has such a lasting legacy. It’s mind binding that this game came out of that time period. Even the games that play better, even the games that are doing more interesting things, can’t hold a candle because for everything these games do right, they always fuck something up.

Playing Half-Life, I’m constantly thinking to myself:

There are no flaws with this.

That’s rare in any period of time, and especially in a time where 3D is awful. Go back and play Ocarina of Time or Banjo Kazooie or Resident Evil 2, which are all notable releases from that same year (yes 1998 is remembered as one of the greatest years in video gaming). NONE of these games hold up as well as Half-Life does.

It even edges out games that come out this generation. I’ve come to wonder if developers have forgotten about Half-Life. That’s insane! Everyone’s playing Half-Life, right? Well then you know what I’m talking about!!

Review finished! 10/10. Perfect.

WAIT

You ever start so high on a thing only to play half-way through it and drop it almost entirely?

oops

Half-Life starts well–well, not really: the beginning of Half-Life is one of the worst things about the game. You have to sit through this boring ass segment that, maybe only lasts thirty or so minutes, but takes forever. You feel like you’ve aged fifteen damn years after sitting through that fucking train ride, watching the boring mundane scenery move around you, and then the walking through the lab–and I always fucking get lost and forget where I have to go–and then the boring as hell experiment that goes wrong. All of that is interesting the first time you play the game, and I get the feeling all these experiences I felt were meant to be felt because Valve wanted me to feel like I was Gordon Freeman just traveling his mundane travel to his mundane underground scientist job. I can’t really fault this game for having a terrible slow beginning.

But I also can.

After shit goes down you scramble around for a bit until finally getting Gordon’s infamous crowbar, and shortly after you also get a decent pistol. Everything is gravy: Perfect pacing, ingenious level design, and moody, chaotic atmosphere.

Until Surface Tension.

See, up until this point the game’s difficulty feels balanced. You’re never too powerful, but you always have enough tools to deal with the situation. Once you’re above ground, you’re contending with the hardest enemies in the game–helicopters, tanks, machine gunners, rocket gunners, and then heavy aliens that shoot bees out of their guns.

THEY.

SHOOT BEES.

OUT OF THEIR GUNS!

(that’s pretty sick)

The game barely provides the player with enough health, nor does it provide enough explosives, with which these things are best fought. I found myself needing to reload past saves just to get through segments with more health, and because the rest of the game had been so well paced, I didn’t find myself compelled to do so because each roadblock hits me that much harder.

And then you run up against the real brick walls. I found the first half of Half-Life brilliantly showed me where to go amongst the chaos of flawlessly executed events. Unlike in Quake II, I never found myself stuck wandering around endlessly. I HATE getting lost in video games–especially in FPS games. FPS games can even be tricky to look up walkthroughs for because progress is so circumstantial that you could have to read the entire damn FAQ just to find where to go next. It was like fresh air flying through this game progress completely unhindered by level design diluted in poor planning and structural design. Everything just naturally made sense.

Until it didn’t.

Maybe it was my fault. There’s this segment that really put up a roadblock: I was outside killing aliens. Sniper nests were set up around this building that was completely locked. There were minefields to the left, so I didn’t want to go there. I circled around the right side of the building and only found that the other side of that minefield was more minefield. The only path forward was another locked door. There was nothing leading me through that minefield, but that’s where I had to go, so I shot grenades off exploding all the mines. Then I found a power generator spurting out electricity, which I had to blow up so I could climb the building, navigate through a maze of vents until I found the ventilation shaft I could drop down into, bringing me into that building. I didn’t even know that I had to go into that building: all indications pointed me forward, through the locked door that had even been trapped with a tripmine. But no: I had to go through a mineshaft, which the game warned me not to cross, then I had to solve a brand new puzzle that wasn’t explained, then I had to assume the path was hidden in some kind of ventilation maze that appeared more like level dressing, and then I had to guess that one shaft was okay to drop down into when all the others were not.

If this sounds confusing that’s because IT WAS CONFUSING.

I spent way too long running around, shooting at and trying to open locked doors just to find out that the solution had been on top of the building the whole time. It wasn’t a satisfying revelation, either. I felt stupid, but more so peeved that I had wasted all that time, and that I had felt the level design itself had made me waste my time.

And all video games waste your time, sure: but should they make you feel like you’ve wasted your time? Getting lost in Half-Life feels worse than getting lost in Quake II because the rest of the game was designed so freaking perfectly! It begins to feel as though they started losing their fucking minds! Like they had the ball, dribbled it perfectly to the goal weaving in and out, and right when they got to the hoop the ball fell to the floor and deflated. You pick up the flat basketball, and it liquifies. Into a puddle of piss.

What am I talking about again? Why am I here? Who are you? Why are you staring at me?

And look–I’m not going to say Half-Life deserves none of its praise, either from me earlier on in this review or from other people. It’s plainly obvious to see why this game is so well regarded, and how it became one of the most influential FPS of all time. Before this game, FPS hadn’t really tried narritive with such a strong scope. After this, games loved relishing in this event based level structure. You can almost say Half-Life was the entire reason we got boring linear single player FPS games–but I wouldn’t say that because Half-Life was never boring.

It just got to be a bit fucky. Like the developer had the ball, and then dropped it. They tried to pick it back up but it got slimey, as though covered in soap. Then it deflated. Then it fell off into a volcano. The volcano erupted, and sent the goey plastic into space. It floats in space forever. Some say you can see it through a telescope during certain weather conditions. But that’s bullshit. No one can see that well with a telescope. Especially since I’ve made all of this up.

Wow I sure am talking about balls a lot today huh?

s c o r e

10/12

Get out of my head, science!

There isn’t much more to talk about. The latter half of the game became brutally difficult to navigate such that I couldn’t even noclip my way around to fucking find said pathway, so I dropped the game entirely. It doesn’t help that, even as a kid, I remember the last level and boss encounter to be crocked full of heaping bullshit. Best to just avoid that altogether and move on to other games.

Like Blood, perhaps?

Ranking my Childhood!

Yeah! So, I initially spoke of my childhood interactions with Half-Life, thus I believe it deserves to be ranked on THE LIST OF ALL LISTS!

Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting

Half-Life

Super Street Fighter

Quake II (PC)

Tony Hawk Pro Skater (N64)

Tetris 2

Street Fighter II The World Warrior

Street Fighter II Alpha

Even if I didn’t finish the game for this review, the glee I felt flying through the first half of this game made for an experience like no other this year. I can’t remember the last time I had felt so much nostalgia for those early levels. It’s one of those moments where, you don’t realize what’s coming next until is starts happening, and then you can remember how you felt when you first experienced those moments. That’s how memorable this campaign is, and the roughness of the latter half does nothing to tarnish the legacy of this game on its whole. At the time there was nothing like it. Today, barely anything comes close, yet you could trace aspects of every modern FPS back to Valve’s breakout masterpiece.

Stay tuned for more Captain Crunch as I explore the fuckery of bullets!

Every other hobby of mine has fallen by the wayside, and the thought that other video games exist does not cross my mind in the moment to moment of Life: a mysterious indie game developed by the equally mysterious development team calling themselves “Deity.”

Life began as a colorful puzzle game, and transitioned into a completely different game, one that downloaded and replaced the prior game, that was platformer, metroidvania, and then a variety of other genres while my character performed different tasks and imagined separate fantasies. Life is interesting, yet addictive in a dangerous capacity that has me worried for my future.

Well, I carried out my platforming throughout junior high. Once I was finished I was greeted with a score screen similar to when the puzzle game ended in early childhood. I was a daydreamer. I was unfocused. It would be challenging for my character to excel in academia. But he was comfortable in social situations, and never backed down from a fight. Plus, he loved to go outside and wander, which meant I had a great video game protagonist. I began to question how these results were generated. If that this character would always be made, no matter who played or the decisions they made, because these skills and qualities will do seem to benefit a person who heroed in a video game.

Similar to before I was given this result my game crashed to desktop. The file disappeared from my hard drive, and a new download began. This one was possibly seven times larger than the old one. I had to let it download overnight–an excruciating wait that led to very poor sleep disturbed by nightmares of which I’d never experienced before. I woke with feverish anticipation and ran to my computer. Once I realized the file downloaded successfully I had to stop myself from abscently licking my lips in anticipation.

To my great surprise I loaded into a fully open action adventure RPG with stunning graphics and effects.

I wandered around an open field taking place in some kickball tournament. I talked to NPCs, who were other children. I had to go get a ball. I ran off through a realistically rendered and layed out neighborhood until I could find a kid kicking a ball. I had a dialogue conversation with him to convince him to let us borrow his ball. He agreed if we’d let him join. I nodded and we went back to our party noticing a meter fill in the bottom right hand screen. My social skills was rising.

When I returned I was greeted by a field full of bloodied bodies. The child transformed into a demon with knives for arms and empty eye sockets which spewed a toxic sludge. The floor gave way to a rusty, chain link gate, and walls of similar nature caged us into some kind of battle arena. My arm transformed into a gun that shot molten rock, and after some shooting I had slaughtered the child viciously. The screen cut straight into that same bright open kickball field, and my team was lifting me up on their shoulders in celebration.

It was jarring–almost surreal–to see such realism clash immediately with video game nonsense without a second of transition. I was instantly compelled to progress onward.

The game moved throughout my character’s high school and college years. Realistic moments would occur, and they would transition into these ultra-video gamey representations of that which happened in the realistic scenes. Locations were gaited by progression blockers much like the roadblocks in GTA, and when I finished story missions these blockers disappeared, allowing my progress. Side objectives littered these highly explorable environments taking the form of fetch quests, kill quests, and collectables. The objectives weren’t very compelling, however the presentation was simply absorbing. Realistic depictions of high school life were interconnected with mysterious spaces that had you questioning the game’s reality constantly.

The thought of anyone living in that M.C. Escher-esque world was difficult to believe, however I began to wonder if these impossible spaces existed for anyone else other than my character. They never commented on it–treating space as if it were just a simple half-mile job, when in actuality there are upside down mountains and country-sized gaps to traverse. It seemed as if being in this state of consciousness wared down on my character’s psyche as he grew more and more frustrated with the world around him.

I felt for the boy. I certainly never went through the kind of trans-dimensional travel that he did, but I’ve felt like an alien plenty of times throughout my life. Especially in high school.

But Assboy (the name I, as a fully grown tax-paying adult, gave my character) would soon gain a best friend and a sense of identity.

My character had a cooking class, and he was made-fun-of ruthlessly by a bully in his weight lifting class (yeah, I gave him a weight lifting class…he needed to bulk up! Okay?? To kill the child demons??? Ok?). That bully was none other than Richard, the child who had tormented my character in the elementary/junior high chapters of Life. We broke out into this amazingly detailed 3D brawl, where everything in the classroom, INCLUDING OTHER STUDENTS, could be used like weapons, and otherwise interacted with during the fight. Richard would slam my head into the door, and I would throw him out of the window only to have him jump back through to continue the fight. It continued forever without either of us taking much damage. Finally, I was prompted with a quick time event that showed my character slicing him up into pieces, and cooking him into a pasta dish. I then served a shadowy, robed figure Richard’s caracas. He loved it, dropping the hood to reveal Richard. Flash transition and now we’re sitting in that cooking class enjoying my work.

From that moment on high school was about my character and Richard hanging out. Best buds. We went to parties. We fought over girls. We cheated on tests. We beat up nerds. We lost fights against jocks. I didn’t really choose the activities we did, but I was given options as to what side-missions I could complete, and in what order I did them in relation to the story missions. I was fully aware that my character was a monster bully, and there was little I could do outside of these open world segments.

Whenever I had a nice choice, I would take that choice. I imagined it was some kind of hidden conscience, and that my character was secretly ashamed, but liked being friends with Richard too much to stand up for what he believed in. It was kinda weak, but it gave me some character that I found interesting. At least more interesting and appealing than him being a flat-out bully. He sometimes saves kittens from trees! Or volunteers to work at the homeless shelter. I don’t know–maybe he can be a firefighting social worker.

Watching my relationship with Richard develop was interesting. There were a lot of nuanced interactions where one tried to overpower the other, rather it be in a conversation, or a decision, and it definitely mirrored some real world relationships I’ve had with people. I was struck by this element of character development, and how I’d seen it plenty of times in film, or novels, but never in video games.

Usually video game conversations are meant to move along a plot, or shepard the player into the next virtual playpen.

In the world of Life, you hang out with people just to enjoy their company. People speak with an emotion that affects others around them. It’s more than a prompt when Richard asks you to drive him to work, because you feel like he’s treating you like a chauffeur. Doing what he says makes you feel shitting about yourself. At the next attempt, you ask him to buy you lunch, and when he asks why you tell him you spent your lunch money on gas. It’s a back and forth, almost guilt trip competition, between two people. Rather than trying to be some kind of leader, it ended up feeling like the two friends refused to feel led. A sentiment I relate to completely.

These story-based, dialogue-heavy scenes were nice deviations from the general ebb and flow of combat. The open world segments went on to represent real-life events in some interesting ways like that opening kick ball game. However, it was generally the representation itself that I found interesting. Rarely was I so enamoured with the gameplay, and how said gameplay felt. Yet if I were reading this as a book I don’t think I’d finish it, which is to say I don’t believe the story stands out by itself. Each element co-exists with another to create a radically compelling product. Without one another, these elements would fall to the sidelines to hang with all other games, books, tv shows, and whatever else I’ve dropped over the years.

For example: you can choose to get your driver’s license, or avoid driving and depend on friends and family to get you around. Doing one is a tremendous financial burden. Your family isn’t poor, but they cannot buy you a car. You’ll have to get a part time job to raise the funds and to maintain your vehicle. If you skip getting a license you’re heavily punished by having little to no way around (the game kinda gates you passed a few blocks in your neighborhood which was a bit too unrealistic), and yet you have much more time to do whatever you want. If you depend on your friends or family too much, they begin to resent you, so you have to be careful if you want to maintain your relationships with people.

If you take the driving course you have to run to a certain side of the map to complete simple 3D platforming challenges. You’re given a time limit to reach the location, and the location itself seems randomized every time it pops up. If you fail to reach that location, which happens occasionally, then you have to restart the jog from where you started–so it’s not like you can complete side-objectives along the way.

Then, when you get the license you have to get a job, which occurs at the same location every time but you have that similar “race the clock” segment you have to do. These missions were always my least favorite in open world games, so you can imagine that I was pretty displeased to see them prop up so frequently here. If the rest of the game hadn’t of been so compelling–or at the very least relaxing–then I don’t know if I would have lasted.

So it’s an open world game with a sharp edge of social simulation. That’s all well and good, but how does combat work, and in what situations is combat presented? Well sometimes you’re arguing with your mom about…well whatever teenagers argue with their moms about…and these scenes are depicted in an almost Assassin’s Creed/Arkham Asylum way. Words, ideas, theories, ideologies: the arguments become enemies surrounding the player. Your reactions are symbolized by your character beating the piss out of your mother’s argument. It’s inventive in representation, but in execution it’s a little mundane, just as it is in those aforementioned games. An enemy attacks you and you either parry or defend, usually parry, then you jump to the next guy to do the same until everyone is dead. It feels brain dead yet chaotic at the same time: like you don’t have a handle on the action, but you never needed it to begin with because it’s just too damn easy.

A boss can be representative of a giant project or test, or your character working up the courage to ask a girl out. These combat encounters offer a little more variation, though the combat itself cycles through a handful of templates. You have the giant boss. He’s really easy. Dodge his attacks, attack when he’s tired until he dies. Then you have the swamp monster, and it’ll raise up and try to attack you while your traveling in a boat. Shoot its weak points with an arm cannon a couple times, and it explodes. These are neat when you first encounter them. I must have fought at least five versions of each variation. This is boring.

But I kept playing on and on because the progression of my character’s narritive was so engrossing. I enjoyed watching my character’s development almost as much as watching or reading about a fictional one. It so mirrored real life that I was getting a lot of feelings swirl around me. One bit would make me feel nostalgic about high school, another angry about a character’s treatment, another had me laughing out loud. Another almost brought me to tears. These plot moments I will not get into. They’re so integral to the story and act of playing the game that spoiling it would perhaps ruin the experience when this game comes out for real.

Although I found the gameplay to be a bit bland compared to the platformer and the puzzler, I applaud this game’s scope. How it progresses in time not just with the character’s life, but with video games as a genre. I feel like I’m getting a sweeping tour through games’ history, and with these side by side fictionalized real life comparisons, I’m engrossed in a world not unlike my own. I feel like this guy I created is a part of me. And that I’m in the game earning my worthless liberal arts degree all over again.

I also really appreciate how the game attempts to represent real life decisions with decidedly gamey aesthetics. It’s exciting! Video games have for so long attempted to mirror film, novels, or tried to look and feel as realistic as possible, that seeing this almost makes me wonder if Deity were out to make an example of what video games can truly achieve. That with interaction, we can truly form brand new forms of storytelling that the players feels directly involved with at an author level. This is much more than a Tell Tale style choose your own adventure. As I continue playing, the game is doing a magnificent job convincing me that every single decision matters. All my previous worries are swayed, and I really can’t wait to hear about other playthroughs, and do some of my own just to make different choices.

I want to test the boundaries of Life. Where does the simulation end?

The only thing that sucks is that I have to stop playing. I have to work. I have to sleep. I have to write this review. I want to get to the end of college so I can move on and see how my character operates in adult life. I wanna see what that game is like. This could be something important for me, in real life. It could really teach me something about the real world, and maybe how I can get out of the current rut I’m in: working dead end job after dead end job, day after day, just to make ends meet, with no real goal or gameplan.

Maybe I shouldn’t let video games teach me these things? I don’t know. Who can really say?

This thing is really special.

feed me more silverback

06/15/2018

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/life-a-review-part-4-expansion/feed/0djneeseLife, A Review Part 3. “A Puppet Will Burn.” Sequence Break.https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/life-a-review-part-3-a-puppet-will-burn-sequence-break/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/life-a-review-part-3-a-puppet-will-burn-sequence-break/#respondTue, 16 Oct 2018 06:30:23 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8801Continue reading Life, A Review Part 3. “A Puppet Will Burn.” Sequence Break.]]>6I received several angry emails about my recent Life Review–some of them death threats–and I cannot let them go unseen. They’re too strange, and if anything were to happen to me, an explination deserves to exist for those who care, even though I do not believe, after everything I’ve done in the wake of this goddamn video game, that I desreve anyone in my life, or for anyone to car eabout me in the slightest.

Excuse my poor penmenship. I’m a little shaken and I just need tog et this together.

“dear assboy,

we terminated our agreement and yet you lie to everyone with your putrid string of alphabet soup you call journalism.

keep this up and more fire will come.

love,

dad.”

Whoever this is thinks its funny to call themselves dad. well jokes on you! My dad couldn’t spell alphabet.

um.

If you haven’t noticed the last two “chapters” of this review were written in June and uploaded recently–in October. This one is being written, here in October, after I had played and reviewed that abomination, and went forward with all the things I had to do, commanded by some unknown force still governing over my day-to-day life even though we have settled our business.

I digress….here’s another email.

“ass,

we’ve sent several pictures of your address to your enemies. they have spoken with us at great lenghts about your demise.

one of them makes great laugh at your screenname.

assboy. ha ha.

do you like bread?

dad.”

Different emails reference my enemies like I’m supposed to know what that means. At this point, my only enemy is this troll who won’t stop harassing me.

Maybe it was my fault? I didn’t respond for a while, hoping that this troll–like all trolls-would loose interest and move a long. idk why I gave him the time of day at all–I should just block whatever email with a subject that mispelled or something. I mean some of them, like the one I posted above, were funny enough that I kept reading them as some kind of joke. Like good on you, you mangled together some kind of weirdly-sometimes-broken insult that, in that Internet-troll sort of way, I find humerous. Perhaps if it stayed this way I would have let this whole thing slide.

But then the serious death threats started coming. I’m not posting all of them, but here’s one I found particularly disturbing.

“youboy,

there are many sick people out in the world. some would rather organs than a can of speghetti o. another likes to smell charred pieces of flesh and not candles like the pumpkin pie you’ve got sitting on your table.

you talk to yourself a lot, you know?

dad.”

This person is exploting a situtaiton I was forced into, likley by their hand, and they know I can’t go get help about it. They know they’ve got me trapped, and they want me to fear for my life. Well after what I’ve been through my life is the last fucking thing I fear for. If you’re reading this you should know that I know where you’re getting this information, so that doesn’t scare me. What scares me is what I’m gonna do when I find you. Understand? Keep this up, and I WILL find you. It’s not a matter of if. It’s only a matter of how deep I will sink to get you out of my life, and how much I’ll enjoy myself in the process?

No matter what I do, they will not stop watching me, and I cann never wipe away that stain on the wall. it moves every day but I could never hope to explain in a way that’ll make any of you understand. ALl i can say is don’t fuckin review games that come to your gmail from some unknown company. you could be screwing with a cult.

a cult of ASS HATS.

Sorry. I had to fucking write something to stop my brain from screaming at me.

More rushed and pointless reviews no one asked for to fucking come. Stay tuned or don’t.

10/15/2018

p.s. i’m not gonna stop writing about Life. You wasted several good months of my life, and in the end I’ll probably lose many more, so I’m going to continue writing. you can kiss my ass shadow puppet. don’t get your strings ina tangle.

My review went up a couple days ago of the 90’s FPS Quake II. It was a great game that I was able to burn through quite quickly, and as such I burned through writing about it such that I missed some key notes I wanted to talk about.

For starters, this game has you interact with the environment by pushing on buttons, or shooting buttons, physically. As in you walk into them. A lot of true 3D games did this and I always hated it. It made the world feel empty and hollow. At the time I thought interacting with the environment gave the world life. It’s a shame I never played Deus Ex back then, that game would have blown my mind.

In games like Goldeneye 007, Duke Nukem 3D, or even the first DOOM, you had to push a physical button that let your character interact with something in the world. I always found that more engaging than, for instance, walking through a door that opens automatically. I want to not only open that door when I wanted to, but close that door once I’ve opened it.

Looking back, that makes little to no sense. There’s slim difference between opening a door by walking through it, and opening a door by pressing the E button. At the same time, I don’t know why developers would have made a game all about traversing a world that features items you just walked into/through. Your character should be the driving force that opens the door. Why does the door open automatically?

Turok actually handled this well, I think. That game has no doors.

Easy?

Instead there were just giant dumbass buttons on the ground that you fucking walk over. That’s enough to lower a gate composed of several bamboo spears I guess.

This time, as I was playing through Quake II, I couldn’t help but notice the buttons on the wall, and how I didn’t feel like I was interacting with anything in this world. This lack did not bother me, yet it did make the game feel less real. More of a fun house I was being pulled through and less of an actual world stalking my carcass. I guess these days that aspect of video games doesn’t bother me because IT’S NOT A REAL WORLD YOU JACKASS! IT’S A VIDEO GAME.

God.

The other thing I failed to talk about–items–was a mechanic that showed up in a lot of FPS around this time. Designers were racking their brains around the time attempting to figure out how they could differentiate the gameplay of their shooters, mostly due to the fact that FPS games at the time were known as “doom clones,” and adding items was an easy addition to add some depth to gameplay. Theoretically. I never fucking used items in these games. I almost always forget that they exist.

Quake II at the very least makes quad damage an item, which means you get to choose when you want to use it. In the first Quake, you got your quad damage and the timer began ticking down immediately, meaning you had to run out and try to find enemies or risk wasting a powerful buff.

The only other item in Quake II I used was the one that let me breathe underwater, and even that had zero necessary practication as every body of water I explored in the game was shallow enough to escape once Bitter Man began to drown. These items are also, generally, included in the FPS games around this time that featured items.

The other thing about items and Quake II is switching between them was a hassle. Most games allow you to switch between your items in an inventory kept separate from your weapons. Not in Quake II! You either switch between weapons, or you switch between weapons AND items. Not a very good way to try and use the item you want to use.

There were shortcut keys for each item. Truthfully, I didn’t see the point in using items most of the time, so I never learned these shortcuts except for the quake damage, which I still have to force myself to use at times. In shooters, item inventories become quickly forgotten.

BECAUSE THE GOAL IS TO SHOOT ALL THE THINGS.

Because quad damage was a thing in Quake II, I will say that items were done more successfully than in Duke Nukem 3D. In that game I didn’t use items at all. AT. ALL.

That’s a lie. I used the jetpack. You had to use the jetpack.

Finally, I neglected to talk about how dark this game is. Not tonally–it is plenty dark there too–I’m speaking of the color pallet. Quake was very much in line with this as well but I’d say Quake II actually seemed to gray it up even more. If it wasn’t for some smart use of lighting effects I would be hard-pressed to call this game a 90’s shooter, mistaking it instead for one from 2005.

Remember how fucking gray those 360 games were? I think Borderlands looks like shit these days, but back then it was a breath of fresh air to see some fuckin’ color in a video game again!

I’m just saying it’s nice Quake inspired more than multiplayer and rocket launchers.

And eh–that’s all. Just a quick addition to my review. Doesn’t change the score–not that that matters–but I remember thinking these thinks and non-thoughting to write them down once my think-tank spilled onto my keyboard and throughout the dorito crumbs and within the internet birthed my article and one thousands screaming terrors haunting your internet history. Folks, clean out your cache. Thank you.

10/11/2018

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/on-quake-ii/feed/0djneesequake II fridge guy(PC) Quake II Reviewhttps://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/05/pc-quake-ii-review/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/05/pc-quake-ii-review/#respondFri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:35 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8778Continue reading (PC) Quake II Review]]>Quake II was more known for its contribution to the online multiplayer scene. I never played its version of death match, though I’ve definitely played Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, so you could call me an expert. It was fun multiplayer.

But today I finished the single player campaign.

I originally owned the game on N64. It was the first first person shooter I owned first, and when I asked my parents if I could have it they made me promise that they wouldn’t hear about me on the news, shooting children from a tree at school. I said but mom, I’m twenty eight years old. And she said get out of my house.

Some of that was true.

I remember enjoying this game, but I never got very far. It was extremely hard for me to play, with enemies that seemingly killed the player in seconds while soaking up all the punishment in the world themselves. I loved how the game sounded and looked, and I especially loved the enemy animations. Like Turok 2, enemies have different dying animations that have different chances of activating, and two enemies particularly have good animations where they sit up and shoot a few last bullets before passing. You can get hit by the bullets so you often have to watch out for this animation unless you’ve gibbed their body, which also happens quite often (and was something I was floored by back in the day). I have tried to play the game several times since my childhood and only now have I stuck with it until its conclusion.

I got a good source port (Yagami) to enhance the resolution for modern systems. It ran perfectly on Windows 10 with very little fiddling. I also downloaded a high resolution texture mod, because them originals are very murky by today’s standards.

The game looks and sounds pretty good. You definitely get some square world syndrome synonymous with 90’s 3D capabilities, but for what it’s worth the art style does go a long way in legitimizing the look of the world. Make sure your brightness isn’t scaled too high, as well as your FOV, and the game can look pretty nice given you’ve downloaded a decent texture mod.

You play as a human soldier code named Bitter Man, and you’ve crashed your ship on an alien base responsible for manufacturing alien/human hybrids. It is your mission to cease the manufacture of soldiers while destroying the base itself. You probably could have skipped straight to destroying the base itself, but then the game wouldn’t be nearly as long or engaging, so I guess this works out.

The stroggs look and sound amazing. Each enemy type has a different sound associated with them so you can often tell which is which when they’re just standing in the room waiting for you. An amazing alert noise follows once they’ve spotted you, and these often scared the piss out of me if I was caught off guard. There’s nothing like walking through a dark bloody hallway and hearing a berserker scream “TRESPASSER” in that wispy, mechanical shriek. A lot of enemies will just whisper or gasp when they see you, and these become quite haunting in later levels when there are enemies of multiple types coming out of the damn ceiling for your blood.

Enemies vary in capabilities, requiring specific strategies in combat. If you just stand there and shoot you will die in a matter of seconds, especially when multiple strogg are present. You must circle strafe, jump, duck around corners, and into bodies of water to navigate combat. The way each room and hallway is designed allows for these interesting and varied combat encounters as does the arsenal you gain over your adventure. You start with an energy pistol with infinite ammo and weak power. There’s a shotgun, a super shotgun, a machine gun, a chaingun, grenades, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, a hyper blaster, a rail gun, and a BFG10k. Every ammunition serves two different weapons (except for the rocket launcher’s rockets), and choosing which weapon to use becomes important when ammo conservation is necessary. You can’t blast a chain gun for more than twenty seconds before you’re completely out of ammo, and you certainly can’t go using the BFG on every enemy you come across, or you’re going to be out of ammo. I will say the game does a great job providing enough ammo and health packs that you’re never caught in a pinch (at least on the normal difficulty).

I liked using the hyper blaster the most. Although powerful, the rail gun has to reload after every shot, making it tough to use in spaces that are too tight. The rocket launcher has way too much splash damage and it shoots extremely slow, so I found myself using it infrequently. The hyper blaster shoots fast and absolutely chews through every enemy in the game quite easily. It’ll stagger enemies that want to run up in your face, and it’ll shred enemies into chunks of meat. Which is just satisfying, okay? Alright.

Super shotguns are usually my favorite weapons in fps, but this game has possibly the weakest I’ve ever seen. It takes one good up close shot to kill the weakest grunts. With every other enemy it’ll take several shots, and even though it momentarily staggers them, you’re often getting hit in between each cock of the barrel. Over the last half of the game I found myself barely using the shotgun at all: only ever choosing it to shoot bodies into meat, or in the rare chance that I ran out of everything else.

Switching between guns leads to an extremely long animation that got me shot often. Bitter Man takes his sweet ass time putting away the previous gun, and he just kinda takes out the next gun and waves it around a little bit like he’s trying to impress his enemies. It takes four seconds before you can shoot your next gun, so if you don’t choose which weapon to switch to specifically you will lose a lot of your precious health. You can easily drop to 50 in that time against the weakest enemies. Stronger ones will just outright kill you in a single shot. I would have liked

The map design, while interesting, gets a bit too confusing at times. I think this is due to the art style–namely the textures–and their inherent muddiness. It creates levels that look the same as the last, and unless you’re leaving behind trails of intact bodies, it can become difficult to remember if you’ve been that direction. This is because objectives have you backtracking constantly, and the levels are designed in this fashion, yet those objectives don’t always point players in the right direction. Areas have their designated names mentioned in the objective but it can become difficult remembering where those ares were when they look the same with their rusty dark look. This has always been an issue with games from id. They never really learned how to design levels that weren’t confusing as fuck to navigate. Usually their games have maps, and this game probably did as well, but I could never find one to use myself. Maybe I just didn’t know the key for it. There are also many loading times in between areas which gets confusing, however when I hit one I always knew I was on the right track.

I’ve certainly played games with more confusing level design–DOOM 64 comes to mind–but this got to be pretty aggravating at times. Enough to make me quit for the night on more than one occasion. However I’d still take this kind of map design over the more streamlined linear romp offered in something like a Call of Duty. I love my shooters, but I need some exploration in my shooters, and this one has that wonderful id style exploration. You won’t find rooms that you can just open for no reason. Usually there are buttons you have to shoot, or hidden objectives you must fulfill. There was one instance in the research facility where there were non-hostile humans begging to die because they had been experimented on, or something. Being the good samaritan I am, I transformed their bodies into meat paste with a shotgun.

Because at what other point am I gonna use that shotgun?

Anyway, once I had killed all the npc humans I could kill, a forcefield went down at a window that imprisoned other insane humans. I figured that was window dressing (haha, get it…it was a window…), however while I was backtracking I happened to shoot the glass and it broke, revealing a new pathway. When I got inside I found a tunnel that led me to a small room with nothing in it. A message popped up on the screen:

This is a hint about a secret id gallery hidden in the last level. Unfortunately I had forgotten about this entirely by the time I got there, but I still thought it was really neat.

The music in this game is nice crunchy metal to go along with the crunchy feel of the game. Admittedly, I turned it off often to listen to my own music while I was playing, but that’s not a disservice to the soundtrack itself. I had to listen to the soundtrack off downloaded files, as the game originally ran its music off the CD (and I obviously have this game downloaded from steam). The source port allowed me to download files and play them, but the songs always ended too soon and then looped, making for a jarring effect.

That said, the new Revocation album “The Outer Ones” makes for a suitable soundtrack. So does Job for a Cowboy’s “Sun Eater” which I have been enjoying once again. I discovered Deathspell Omega and Tomb Mold, and played their shit too as I slaughtered through Quake II, and those are also make for a great murderous backtrack. There’s nothing quite like playing violent games with extreme metal in the background. Makes for a very therapeutic experience.

The narritive of the game is strange. You can tell this game was set up to be focused on narritive, yet such narritive is non-existent. You know you’re a human soldier sent to kill the strogg and destroy their base. You can tell through objectives and the stages themselves that they abduct humans, experiment and kill them, otherwise crafting their bodies into mechanical alien human hybrids to fill out their army. That’s it. There’s no real dialogue, or cutscene in the game other than a few hints here and there that you are somewhere doing something. This is fine, but why have the game feel like it needs a narritive? DOOM didn’t have a narritive at all besides the end of each episode (and maybe what was in the manual) and that was fine! It was just more focused on the shooting and level design. The first Quake had a narritive in mind, but since plans fell through the game came out without that story. But for some reason the levels here are designed to be this really straightforward journey from point a to point b. It’s almost an in-between of the maze structure to a more story based linear romp, except it’s not always linear, and there’s no real story.

8

amazing

I don’t have a problem with this, and truly I don’t have a problem with the more confusing levels either. I had a blast with this game. It offered enough of a challenge to wet my appetite, and it provided more than enough tools for blood destruction, while fulfilling my metal desires. A day or two after beating the game I restarted on the hard difficulty and I had to really force myself to stop playing–it was that engaging. The added difficulty, plus my familiarity with the levels and weapon strategies, made the game feel even more fun than the first playthrough. I have a feeling that I’ll be playing this game more, as well as checking out more mods from the expansive modding community.

I’m glad I’ve finally beaten Quake II having been such a huge fan of the first game, and since this game holds a dear spot in my childhood as being my first owned FPS. I wish I still had that copy. I think I’ll get ahold of it sometime, play it, and write up a short little comparison. I already know it’s known as a shitty port, but since it has that childhood significance, why not? Besides, I already own the N64 port of the first Quake as well as DOOM64. Gotta complete my collection, right?

By the way, with all this talk of childhood you know what’s coming. Right?

RIGHT?!?

RANKING MY CHILDHOOD

Street Fighter II Turbo Hyper Fighting

Super Street Fighter

Quake II (PC)

Tony Hawk Pro Skater (N64)

Tetris 2

Street Fighter II The World Warrior

Street Fighter II Alpha

As I said, this review will have to have a sibling review once I get my hands on that N64 copy. I do think that having these sort of periphery reviews (games I didn’t specifically play during my childhood, but have some relation to my childhood) are important for my list. Especially since this is 100% verified science–important science that needs to be exhaustively employed for the betterment of mankind. Or somethin.

Anyway, this has me really itching to replay Half Life. I think I’m gonna go do that now.

Post release, I decided this review did not have enough content. So, for an extra $15, you can purchase this DLC mission! Here! Where I talk about a few things I missed writing this review, like the item system and the lack of level interactivity!

]]>https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/05/pc-quake-ii-review/feed/0quake 2 symboldjneesequake 2 screenshot 679.jpgquake 2 screenshot 07.jpgquake 2 screenshot 53Quake 2 ending screen.jpgLife, A Review Part 2: Shadowshttps://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/life-a-review-part-2-shadows/
https://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/life-a-review-part-2-shadows/#respondTue, 02 Oct 2018 17:59:52 +0000http://firstdraftinthetrashblog.wordpress.com/?p=8758Continue reading Life, A Review Part 2: Shadows]]>This is, as the title suggests, a continuation of a prior piece. If you haven’t yet read part 1, you can do so at this link.

So first version was erased, and a second was downloaded. I checked to make sure, and no matter what I could not revert to that last version. I couldn’t even redownload the first version, as the attachment on my email from Deity was completely erased: as if my downloading of the file was a 1 time thing. Weird.

Nevertheless I kept on going with the second part of Life. This time it was a platformer, and I was immediately optimistic given the nature of the first game: puzzles enhancing with the passage of time. I have always been a fan of platformers, so to experience them along the same lines would be fantastic. What I got was that, plus much more.

It started simple. It was a recreation of 1-1, only instead of blocks and gombas it was desks and homework, which was represented by mathematical equations. Fear not–this was not edutainment! I was not answering questions, I was merely jumping and stomping in a classroom. Instead of jumping on a flag poll I merely handed an apple to my teacher. I was then taken to the next level, where I had to fight off bullies calling me “teacher’s pet” and “wimp.” Combat was like final fight. After I defeated the bullies, I moved on.

From there platforming would gain difficulty. Mechanics were introduced over time, such as powerups and wall jumping. What was most interesting, however, was the visual design. At some points I was clearly playing through a child’s imagination: castles and knights, space and aliens, soldiers and war, cops and robbers. These segments were linked together by real world scenarios like swinging, completing chores, or taking a bath. My character would be dressed in a way that represented what I was doing. Sometimes everything would be drawn crudely, as though my character were in a class drawing during a lesson and I was to reenact what the kid was drawing. My protagonist aged until they hit junior high.

But before junior high there was a boss. Except, it wasn’t a boss. A character named Richard came. He called me by name. No, not my character, who was named “Assboy.” He called me Donavan, and he asked me how I was.

Cheeky developers! They put my name in as a gag. Tryin to catch me slippin…that’s not gonna work boys!

I answered from the four choices provided that I was doing okay. He said check this out, and he jumped over a giant gap that I would never be able to jump across. I said okay, that was cool, what now? He challenged me to do it, and I tried, but fell. I was treated to a terrible cutscene of this Richard kid stomping my head into a puddle of mud beside a train track, which honestly disturbed me, especially since it felt so disconnected from what I had experienced in this game.

When he finally left me alone, I was lost in the woods. The woods were depicted as being in a metroidvania. I was left exploring, reaching dead ends, and hunting for pickups. Standard fair meant I was double jumping after finding the right shoes, and opening doors with the right keys. Combat was basic melee with an artificial looking projectile that looked like a fireball. Enemies were mutated humans. It was very dark and foreboding. There were horror themed sections where zombies crawled out from the grave. Or people turning into monsters to attack.

Over and over I was seeing my character get stabbed in the back by Richard, as though he were suffering some kind of PTSD. It was amazing to see the feelings my protagonist was going through being artfully represented like this. A child would feel this hurt after what Richard did to him, and that trauma would remain psychologically after the physical wounds healed up. In his imagination, he would invent such nightmares, as they are akin to that everyday dramas children suffer amongst each other.

It wasn’t always fun. The controls felt fluid enough, but often I was given challenges that were unfair, like that Richard challenge with the impossible gap, and when I failed I didn’t get another chance: the game just moved on to the next segment. Failing at a task, and receiving no second chance, feels unsatisfactory, but I think this was the point. It really highlights the realism this game is meant to recreate with video game artifice. I just wish it was done in a more fun way. I definitely began to miss the lives system in older games, or the quick reload of more modern. It always seemed like a given in video games, and this one sets out to challenge that.

Finally I made it passed the metroidvania section and I moved onto junior high. Except now the platforming gave way to myriad of gameplay styles. Sometimes I’d be building armies to fight other armies, representing history homework. Other times I’d be fighting in a Street Fighter clone, or shooting in a Call of Duty clone. Everything was symbolic of growing into adolescence, and struggling with the oncoming surge of emotions and hormones.

The video game stuff was in my character’s imagination, and it represented their thoughts. I remembered how my character was deemed to be aggressive after those puzzles in his formative years, and I again wished I could go back and replay that section. It was much more relaxing and fun, however this section was much more imaginative and interesting overall. My character had far too many fantasies about killing demons in hell. Although I’m a really big fan of DOOM I couldn’t help but feel somewhat sorry for my character’s life. He was really struggling, and with these fantasies I began to wonder about his future, and rather or not he would take some dark alleys through life.

In the real world my character was getting into fights, both with other kids and the teachers. Then with their parents. Richard would turn up again and again to dump on my character, but he (and only he: no other character did this in the game) would call me by my real name. Whoever sent me this game at Deity must be chuckling to themselves knowing that by now I was tripping their little trap. They spent a lot of time coding my name into pieces of dialogue, which were all over the place. I guess it helped that the character Richard was the only person in this entire game addressing my character by my name.

One day after a long play session I closed the game out for the night and checked my task manager. Sure enough, the program was still running. I tried closing it and I was warned that I didn’t have permission.

I contacted the tech support about this. They responded about how it was a beta, and windows 10 still didn’t quite agree with the game. However they were working on this issue.

They might be right. But I don’t know. Something is very strange about this game. I can’t stop thinking about it. The other night, I even had dreams about it. I think this has gone beyond some form of professionalism. I need to beat this game, now. It’s not about the review.

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m too tired to rewrite that paragraph. I’m too tired to keep writing. I’ve been playing this fucking game all day. Nothing else is even satisfying if I turn it on, and I can’t focus on a book or a tv show or a youtube video. If I go outside I just think about those mutated people in Life and I go back home to see if they’re ever explained.

Secretly I wonder if I’m going to start seeing mutated people in real life. I know they aren’t real. But who knows how this game is effecting me.

Okay I’m really letting this stupid game get to me. I need to log off for the night. I need some sleep. I need to play more Life.